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Recipes: Minestra
No. 36. Minestra alla Casalinga and Turnips Ingredients: Rice, turnips, butter, gravy, tomatoes.
Cut three or four young turnips into slices and put them on a dish, strew a little Ingredients: Rice, butter, salt over them, cover them stock, vegetables. with another dish, and let them stand for about two hours until the water has run out of them. Then drain the slices, put them in a frying - pan and fry them slightly in butter. Add some good gravy and mashed - up tomatoes, and after having cooked this for a few minutes pour it into good boiling stock. Add three ounces of well-washed rice, and boil for half-an-hour.
Minestra loses its flavour if it is boiled too long. In Lombardy, however, rice, macaroni, &c., are rarely boiled enough for English tastes.
No. 38. Minestra alla Capucina Ingredients: Rice, anchovies, butter, stock, and onions.
Scale an anchovy, pound it, and fry it in butter together with a small onion cut across, and four ounces of boiled rice. Add a little salt, and when the rice is a golden brown, take out the onion and gradually add some good stock until the dish is of the consistency of rice pudding.
No. 39. Minestra of Semolina Ingredients: Stock, semolina, Parmesan.
Put as much stock as you require into a saucepan, and when it begins to boil add semolina very gradually, and stir to keep it from getting lumpy. Cook it until the semolina is soft, and serve with grated Parmesan handed separately. To one quart of soup use three ounces of semolina.
No. 40. Minestrone alla Milanese Ingredients: Rice or macaroni, ham, bacon, stock, all sorts of vegetables.
Minestrone is a favourite dish in Lombardy when vegetables are plentiful. Boil all sorts of vegetables in stock, and add bits of bacon, ham, onions braized in butter, chopped parsley, a clove of garlic with two cuts, and rice or macaroni. Put in those vegetables first which require most cooking, and do not make the broth too thin.
Leave the garlic in for a quarter of an hour only.
IIO No. 41. Minestra of Rice and Cabbage Ingredients: Rice, cabbage, stock, ham, tomato sauce.
Cut off the stalk and all the hard outside leaves of a cabbage, wash it and cut it up, but not too small, then drain and cook it in good stock and add two ounces of boiled rice. This minestra is improved by adding a little chopped ham and a few spoonsful of tomato sauce.
No. 42. Minestra of Rice and Celery Ingredients: Celery, rice, stock.
Cut up a head of celery and remove all the green parts, then boil it in good stock and add two ounces of rice, and boil till it is well cooked.
FISH No. 43. Anguilla alla Milanese (Eels) Ingredients: Eels, butter, flour, stock, bay leaves, salt, pepper, Chablis, a macedoine of vegetables.
Cut up a big eel and fry it in two ounces of butter, and when it is a good colour add a tablespoonful of flour, about half a pint of stock, a glass of Chablis, a bay leaf, pepper, and salt, and boil till it is well cooked. In the meantime boil separately all sorts of vegetables, such as carrots, cauliflower, celery, beans, tomatoes, &c. Take out the pieces of eel, but keep them hot, whilst you pass the liquor which forms the sauce through a sieve and add the vegetables to this. Let them boil a little longer and arrange them in a dish; place the pieces of eel on them and cover with the sauce. It is most important that the eels should be served very hot.
Any sort of fish will do as well for this dish.
No. 44. Filletti di Pesce alla Villeroy (Fillets of Fish) Ingredients: Fish, flour, butter, Villeroy.
Any sort of fish will do, turbot, sole, trout, &c. Cut it into fillets, flour them over and cook them in butter in a covered stewpan; then make a Villeroy (No. 18), dip the fillets into it and fry them in clarified butter.
No. 45. Astachi all' Italiana (Lobster) Ingredients: Lobsters, Veluté sauce, Marsala, butter, forcemeat of fish, olives, anchovy butter, button mushrooms, truffles, lemon, crayfish, Italian sauce. Two boiled lobsters are necessary. Cut all the flesh of one of the lobsters into fillets and put them into a saucepan with half a cup of Veluté sauce (No. 2) and half a glass of Marsala, and boil for a few minutes. Put a croûton of fried bread on an oval dish and cover it with a forcemeat of fish, and on this place the whole lobster, cover it with buttered paper, and put it in a moderate oven just long enough to cook the forcemeat. Then make some quenelles of anchovy butter, olives, and button mushrooms, mix them with Italian sauce (No. 6), and garnish the dish with them, and round the croûton arrange the fillets of lobster with a garnish of slices of truffle.
Add a dessert-spoonful of crayfish butter and a good squeeze of lemon juice to the sauce, and serve.
No. 46. Baccalà alla Giardiniera (Cod) Ingredients: Cod or hake, carrots, turnips, butter, herbs.
Boil a piece of cod or hake and break it up into flakes, then cut up two carrots and a turnip; boil them gently, and when they are half boiled drain and put them into a stewpan with an ounce of a fireproof dish with two butter, half a teacup of boiling water, salt, and herbs. When they are well cooked add the fish and serve. Fillets of lemon soles may also be cooked this way.
A run of Lombard soups followed by three fish dishes, written for cooks who already had stock, velouté and a larder of compound butters on hand. The instructions assume that knowledge; here is what needs filling in.
- What minestra meansNot a thin consommé but a stock-based soup thickened by its grain — rice, semolina, macaroni. The book's own warning is the hinge: minestra loses its flavour if boiled too long, so add the rice or pasta only when the vegetables are nearly done.
- Half an hour of rice is too longNo. 36's thirty minutes will overcook most modern rice. Italian risotto rices (arborio, carnaroli, vialone nano) need about 15-18 minutes in simmering broth and should still have a firm centre. The author's aside that Lombards rarely boil rice or macaroni enough for English tastes suggests Italian practice was shorter than the half-hour given here.
- Ounces to cupsThree ounces of raw rice is a scant half cup, four ounces a generous half cup; three ounces of semolina is about half a cup. A quart of stock with 3 oz semolina gives four modest servings.
- Draining the turnipsSalting sliced young turnips between two dishes for two hours draws out water and bitterness. Pat them dry before frying or they will steam rather than colour. Modern hakurei or small purple-top turnips work; large woody ones do not.
- "Good gravy"In this period gravy means concentrated meat juices or a reduced brown stock, not flour-thickened pan sauce. A few spoonfuls of well-reduced beef or veal stock does the job.
- The anchovy"Scale an anchovy" refers to a whole salt-packed fish: rinse off the salt, split it and lift out the backbone. One salt-packed anchovy is roughly two oil-packed fillets, and those need no rinsing. Note that No. 38 fries already-boiled rice, so it is closer to a soupy rice than a soup.
- Cross-referencesVilleroy (No. 18) is a thick coating sauce; the floured, butter-cooked fillets must be coated and the coating left to set firm before frying, or it will slide off. Velouté is No. 2, Italian sauce No. 6. Without those the fillet and lobster recipes cannot be followed.
- Oven and lobster scaleA moderate oven is roughly 350-375F. No. 45 is a banquet centrepiece: two boiled lobsters, fish forcemeat, truffles and crayfish butter, plated on a fried-bread croûton. The recipe specifies only that the oven time be long enough to cook the forcemeat.
- Sourcing eelThe European eel, Anguilla anguilla, is now assessed as critically endangered and its export from the EU is prohibited; supply is tightly regulated. The recipe itself says any sort of fish will do as well, and monkfish or a thick piece of hake stands in well.
- Garlic timingIn the minestrone, the slashed clove is meant to be lifted out after fifteen minutes so it perfumes the broth without dominating it. Do not forget it, and do not chop it.
The Cook's Decameron (1901) framed its Italian recipes as ten days of dinners among friends, at a moment when English cookery books gave Italian food little attention beyond macaroni and Parmesan. These minestre come from Lombardy, and the regional loyalties are on the page: alla casalinga means housewife-style or plain home cooking, alla capucina is usually taken as a nod to the frugality associated with the Capuchin friars, and minestrone is described exactly as it functioned — the dish you make when the garden is producing everything at once, bulked out with bacon and ham ends. Rice rather than pasta dominates because rice has been grown in the Po valley since the fifteenth century, and the author's aside that Lombards never boil their rice or macaroni enough for English tastes is an early English-language notice of the Italian preference for firm rice and pasta. The fish recipes, by contrast, are Franco-Italian restaurant cooking: Villeroy, velouté and crayfish butter belong to the professional French kitchen rather than to a Milanese home.